Enabling technology diffusion with the Open Lab Starter Kit

In recent years, fabrication laboratories or Fab Labs have challenged the dominant position of conventional large-scale manufacturing by offering low-threshold opportunities to engage with production. Fab Labs are therefore catalysts to the emancipation of manufacturing from primarily industrial to personal and communal contexts. However, various bureaucratic and resource-related challenges make the set-up of Fab Labs difficult and hinder an equitable spatial distribution of Fab Labs; there exists, for example, a great difference in the number of labs between industrialized and developing countries. This is contrary to the Fab Lab idea as it hurts the egalitarian access to digital fabrication machines. In response to this, efforts such as the Open Lab Starter Kit (OLSK) make use of Open-Source Hardware (OSH) and specifically Open-Source Machine Tools (OSMT) to facilitate the establishing of labs. The costs and thresholds of these so-called open labs are significantly lower compared to conventional Fab Labs because the machine tools used in them can be manufactured and replicated locally, using local resources. This chapter presents the OLSK approach to open-sourcing the design and documentation of machine tools, and furthermore examines its scope as an enabling technology for a more inclusive and equitable fab city concept.

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